The Urban Codes studio at Fabrica, Benetton’s communications research center located in Treviso, Italy, creates new tools in order to better understand contemporary cities, citizens and urban cultures. It focuses on how people interact with each other and their environment, the changing norms of living in cities, how people navigate and communicate in their urban environments, and the types of artifacts, markings and patterns that urban cultures create both physically and virtually. Urban Codes creates exhibitions, installations, media, apps and artifacts in order to articulate research about how contemporary communications technology is changing the way we live, work, play, organize and create in cities, buildings and communities.

We are currently looking for new eager researchers to join our team. We have positions for creative coders, media artists, architects, web developers, electrical engineers, hardware hackers, mobile developers, graphic designers, urbanists and computer scientists. If you are 25 or younger, a dedicated worker and have a passion for creative endeavors, please visit our applications page and submit your portfolio.

Successful applicants will be invited for a two week trial residency period in Treviso, Italy, where they will be provided housing accommodations, free lunches and an energetic atmosphere with other young talented individuals from a variety of creative disciplines. Successful trial residents will be offered a one year research fellowship, where they will be provided housing accommodations with one or two other researchers, health care coverage, free lunches and a monthly stipend.

Aaron Siegel (b.1983) is a transdisciplinarian with a concentration in computational information design. He received his BFA in Digital Media Art from the Cadre Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University in 2006, and his MFA in Design|Media Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008.
His motivation comes from interesting data sets, interfaces, and interventions in public space. His work utilizes data visualization to address complex systems of power structures and networks of influence. He aims to achieve an overlapping relationship with aesthetic representations of data and scientific empiricism. His work strives to display relationships and correlations within information systems that would remain unseen from any other perspective.
He has worked for various institutions including the University of California, Los Angeles, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Electroland, Directed Play, Narduli Studios, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, and Facebook. He has exhibited work in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Reno, Memphis, Indianapolis, Seattle, New York, Guadalajara, Madrid, Trieste, Heidelberg, and Singapore.
Aaron is currently Head of Interaction and Online Experience and Lead of the Urban Codes studio at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy.